I’ve been on a quest to find the best webpage builder to go with WordPress, this makes life comfortable and allows you to construct web pages without manual code editing. My criteria are speed and simplicity.

Did you already know WordPress gets used on over 75 million websites? I’d love to know how many prefer SquareSpace, Wix and Jimdo, by the way, I’ve used them and like them too, they are not part of the comparison here though, but, do please let me know if you have some statistics. Want to see some beautiful WordPress sites, then check out https://wordpress.org/showcase/

For those hungry to not waste time, here is my personal list of the best page builders.

They are all very good tools and urge you to try each, to find your personal favourite, because there are differences in usability, which is why you might choose Divi or Elementor over Beaver Builder. One details regarding Visual Composer, as good as it is and I think it is excellent, to change the size of heading elements and such, you will need to write a little CSS, but there are plenty of tutorials.

So how did I come to my conclusion, go to my “Go Amazon” page and you’ll see the layout which I designed. It contains a lot of YouTube videos. The testing truly surprised me, more than once. For example, what seemed to be the killer feature in Divi, image overlay on video, what I thought was for load speed, actually seemed to make no difference, at least at the time when I tested it, but, perhaps there was a bug or optimization missed on my part.

Visual Composer

I only heard about this through a WordPress group on Facebook. You’ll need to download it from their website, then upload via the plugins screen. It takes about 5 minutes to download stuff when you first install. It’s not one of the faster editors to load. However, it more than makes up for usability and final page speed. I found my page was about half a second faster than all the other page designers I tested. A couple of times I got my page layout messed up but was quickly able to recover. The only negative for beginners I already mentioned, you might need to know or learn a little CSS to manipulate the font types and sizes of heading tags and such. For learning that you get a highly optimised page.

Divi

An extremely good plugin, I don’t think they have a free trial edition, but, I think you have to try it. The design interface is really good and you’ll be happily building pages within minutes of installation. Their customer services are quick too. If your looking for something that just works, then you’ll really be a very happy customer. I lay particular worth on mobile rendering of pages and here I had no problems, unlike the with some of the other page builders.

MotoPress

There is something to be said about plugins appearing on the second page of the WordPress plugins list – try them – you may be surprised. Although, I found it a little tricky to get started because the menu was not always visible. Once getting used to the drag and drop interface, I was able to accelerate along and found it very good. The editor sometimes felt a bit slow, but you’ll also find that with my current favourite page builder tool. One button I missed was for duplicating/copying content.

SiteOrigin

First I wasn’t sure it was activated, but, it is visible as a new tab. You design the layout similar to other page builders, which is by defining rows and columns. I liked how you can give each block a title. The rich text editor requires you to install the SiteOrigin Widgets Bundle (an extra plugin), but, I think it was worth it and I really like the live page editor. I also installed their North theme which allowed me to make full-width pages. I like the widgets menu where you can activate more features like social icons & icons. The amount of video & code I found while googling showed me they care a lot about their product and this is actually a very good page builder – it was one of the fastest.

Beaver Builder

I liked that it has an integrated tutorial on first use, however, after 5 clicks I was getting a little annoyed. Like many other products, it is not long before you realise you need to buy something and for only 199$ you get the theme which would provide full-width page layout. I wanted to try the designer, so took a theme CustomPressVersion by TwoPoints that was free, according to the description it is optimized and has a very small stylesheet which is just 20kb (that really is tiny). The layout work was initially a little awkward the further I got down the page, I had problems adding content, eventually though I figured it out. They get plus points for the save and exit button: I found on other page builders that I lost work because I had forgotten to save.

Elementor

Easy to find because it is number one on the plugins search screen. It has 300’000 active installations and at the time of writing nearly 500 five-star ratings. Its easy to use, the pages are fast and think it has everything you need to make great pages. It is number one on my list because it is slick and the easiest to learn. Note that I don’t use it encountered a problem with the look of my page on mobile devices. I couldn’t get them to look the way I wanted which could have been a problem with the 3 column layout I chose. I then switched to Visual Composer, it’s nowhere near as user-friendly though. I great feature on Elementor I really liked, was being able to add shadow to boxes, which made the page look great and I liked their drag and drop interface the best over all others I tested.

Summary

A common problem I had was getting full page design. I tested a few more page builder tools and they didn’t make my list because they commanded money for that or for a widget to add social icons. In the end, I got my social icons for Instagram, YouTube and Facebook via the plugin AccessPress Social Icons which is free at the time of writing.

You are going to have to pay something to get a good page builder. I think I found my favourites and would urge you to go out there and test them all. It will take you a day, but, it is time well worth spent.

As a final note, I want to mention I do not have any affiliate links here. I do not make money from recommending any of this software.